Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic is the best adjective I can think of. You nailed it spot on with this one -- the emotions, the narrative, the buildup and denouement, all just amazing. I would have liked to see a bit more emotion from Holiday, but I guess its just not part of his character, and besides, you surrounded him with so many colorful people that it doesn't really matter.

Excellent work, Raspberry.

I mean, not nearly as good as my stuff, but still a pretty good job ._________________

Hrm, thought I'd commented on this already. You've got good stuff as usual, Raspberry. The ending here was rather anticlimactic, but in a way that made sense. In a war like that, even life and death gets to be pretty routine stuff.

You did a good job tying up loose ends here, with the waitress showing up again, and all the references to past stories. I enjoyed how you explained the disjointed narrative as being Holiday's incomplete memoirs, as well.

The last few lines were brilliant, too, and are pretty much the series in a nutshell. Nice work, and congrats on finishing this up!_________________

As usual, Raspberry, I was impressed by this entry (the final one?) The sudden and haphazard evacuation of Tulane was perfectly in line with your depiction of the military thus far. The evacuation scenes offered a great opportunity for some emotion and conflict, and I felt you grasped onto that pretty well. Still, given the drama of a handful of soldiers evacuating a whole town, I felt like you could have given us more. However, this series has been more about effective, punctuated sequences shown to us from a ground's eye view, rather than a sprawling narrative. The Wells incident was a great example of one of these sequences. His horrific actions were stated matter-of-factly, and his demise tagged on as an ambiguous after thought - it gave me a terrific moment of reflection as I read it.

I enjoyed Holidays musings as he fled Tulane aboard the Midnight Dreary. As he thought about all the events he experienced on Tulane never happening, it becomes clear that they might as well not have happened. The campaign accomplished no goals, and Tulane was lost. It was a great ending note to the tone of futility that pervaded this series.

The final few paragraphs did a good job of giving the series closure while leaving room to continue writing in this version of the universe. Do you plan to continue the adventures of Holiday on Earth through to Installation 00? I feel like this character has a lot more to say, and I'd be interested to see how you'd handle the tone of the story when dealing with canon.

At any rate, great job with this one. I look forward to whatever you give us in the future.